I’m not sure you realise that this is a far more generic rhetorical phenomenon that encompasses all kinds of situations. Like referring to the FBI as Quantico.

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simonh 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Or Scotland Yard for the metropolitan police in london. They were commonly known by that name almost immediately after their founding in 1829.

Perhaps the earliest example is Pharaoh. It originally referred to the royal residence.

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TeMPOraL 4 days ago | parent [-]

TIL Scotland Yard is the Metropolitan Police. I thought it was its own thing named "Scotland Yard" for some reasons I never bothered to investigate.

Which kind of proves your point.

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krisoft 4 days ago | parent [-]

> TIL Scotland Yard is the Metropolitan Police.

It is not? But also it is.

You are right that when people say "Scotland Yard" they do frequently mean the whole Metropolitan Police. And you are also right that there is no other police entity (that I know of) which would be associated with that name.

But also, "Scotland Yard" was just the address of the original headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. Even then it wasn't the whole organisation, just the address of one of the buildings. Then they got a new headquarters and called it "New Scotland Yard". And to confuse matters further they repeated this multiple times. Which means there are 3 buildings which were called "New Scotland Yard" at various points in time.

And today of course the MET occupies far more real estate than just the famous "Scotland Yard". For example if you look at this FOI request[1] you can see that there were 226 other buildings the Metropolitan Police used in 2023. (Not counting covert/sensitive estate).

1: https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...

Scotland Yard was originally the name of the street in which headquaters of the Metropolitan Police.

	▲	TeMPOraL 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Right. What I meant is, until today I believed that "Scotland Yard" was an entirely different law enforcement agency from MET.

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lukan 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh, or using building names like White House and Kremlin?

Yes, I heard of the concept. My point was just that many have a misconception about the nature of the EU.